Harry Hill at Wilton's Music Hall: like being on drugs...

Wilton's Music Hall was the perfect venue for Harry Hill's UK tour warm-ups this weekend. It was built in 1859 and some of the former doctor's skits felt as if they dated from the same century. This is not a negative criticism. Far from it. Hill is the nearest thing we have to a living embodiment of a vaudevillian superstar.

As the title suggests, New Bits And Greatest Hits is a partial overview of his thirty-year career, but this is no mere pension-plan cash-in for the big-collared 60-year-old. You don't have to look too closely to see that new versus old in various senses is a unifying motif of the night.

This thread was set up quickly with Hill picking out "baldy, speccy" audience members and comparing them to more youthful fans. His demographic is certainly wide. I wonder what the children who were there because he hosts Junior Bake Off made of his wig-enhanced Smiths medley, a nod to his Morrissey tribute on Stars in their Eyes back in 2001.

Elsewhere there was plenty of cap-doffing to his showbiz antecedents alongside TV Burp-style topical pops at A Place In The Sun and The Repair Shop. Some bendy-legged eccentric dancing harked back to the variety era before Hill showed off more modern moves with a sublime send up of Beyoncé's Single Ladies.

Hill frequently returned to the theme of generational change. There was a rare glimmer of social comment when he slyly quipped that his cohort didn't have time to pull down statues – they were too busy fighting for important things like women's rights and ending apartheid.

But this was essentially ninety minutes of prime nutty nonsense, not a political rally. I doubt if the unashamed entertainer was offering any real criticism of the NHS when he said that when his nan needed a hip replacement they were all out of hips, so they used an elbow instead.

The emphasis was very much on rapid fire silliness. The stage was littered with props, from a sentry box to huge cut-outs of his glove puppet Stouffer to a random trombone and a desk which he was too busy to sit down at. A slogan on the front summed up his modus operandi: "prolonged low-level disruption.".

At its best watching Hill's stage show is like being on hallucinogenic drugs without actually being on hallucinogenic drugs. Giant felines, badgers in toy cars, hamsters playing swingball, a broken ventriloquist's dummy, a bust of Queen Victoria hobbling around. "This isn't a dream," said Hill during one zany skit. It definitely felt like one.